The July, 1972, issue of Birth Defects, in which geneticist James Crow
promoted eugenics

"If eugenics is a dirty word," said University of Wisconsin geneticist
James Crow in 1972, "we can find something else that means the same
thing." And he pointedly asked, "How far should we defend the right of a
parent to produce a child that is painfully diseased, condemned to an early
death, or mentally retarded?" Prof. Crow served on the board of the
American Eugenics Society for several years in the 1970s--both before and
after the group changed its name to Society for the Study of Social Biology.
The Society's name change "does not coincide with any change of its
interests or policies," the group assured its followers in 1973.

In pushing eugenics, Crow didn't represent some fringe group in
genetics. He was past president of two major U.S. genetics groups. The
eugenics board on which he served was chaired for years by genetics giant
Theodosius Dobzhansky and also included other leading geneticists.(1)

Frederick Osborn (1889-1981), the mastermind of the American
Eugenics Society after World War II, already was using a substitute for the
dirty word of eugenics. In 1965 he told a correspondent: "The term medical
genetics has taken the place of the old term negative eugenics..."(2)
The older term means efforts to prevent births among people deemed to be inferior,
especially those with inherited disabilities.

Osborn, six feet and eight inches in height, was an impressive son of
the American establishment. Born into a wealthy New York family, he
graduated from Princeton and made his own fortune in business. Later he
had experience as an army general and diplomat. But eugenics--the effort to
breed a better human race--was his main work and his passion. Highly
intelligent and shrewd, Osborn was extremely well-connected. His friends
included President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt and various Rockefellers,
whose fortune he tapped for eugenics projects.

Osborn and his eugenics colleagues were deeply involved in efforts to
prevent the births of people with disabilities. They encouraged the influence
of eugenics--a political ideology--on the science of genetics. And they
supported development of prenatal testing and eugenic abortion in the
1950s and 1960s. Prenatal testing is a huge funnel that's wide at the top--
enticing and pressuring women and couples to agree to testing--and
narrowly pointed toward eugenic abortion at the bottom.

This article will show how organized eugenics led to the lethal
combination of testing and abortion. But it's important to keep in mind that
eugenics also has influence far beyond its formal membership. The eugenics
ideology is widespread in science and medicine, and has been for nearly a
hundred years.(3)

A later article will describe government involvement and show how the
testing-abortion combination has made pregnancy a wretched experience for
many women and couples. It will explore ways in which resistance to
eugenics might become more effective. It also will highlight programs that
offer moral support and practical aid to families with special-needs children.

The Deepest Bias in Eugenics

So many people have condemned eugenics for its racial and class bias
that some may assume these are its only problems. Yet bigotry against
people with disabilities is its deepest bias of all, and possibly its oldest.
People killed handicapped babies in ancient Greece and Rome, and some
great philosophers supported the practice. In The Republic, Plato endorsed
infanticide under the euphemism of "put away": "...the offspring of the
inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away
in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be." In his Politics,
Aristotle bluntly declared: "...let there be a law that no deformed child shall
live."(4) Ancient Greeks and Romans drowned handicapped newborns or
abandoned them to the elements and wild animals. Besides killing children
with visible handicaps, they probably killed many who were well-formed but
sickly.(5)

English scientist Francis Galton invented the modern form of eugenics
and in 1883 coined the actual word "eugenics" from Greek words that mean
"well-born." He said eugenics "must be introduced into the national
conscience, like a new religion." Alluding to his cousin Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution, Galton claimed: "What Nature does blindly, slowly, and
ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly."(6)

Galton disciples in America, though, eventually proved that they could
be as cruel as ancient Greeks and Romans. Today, prenatal testing targets
for killing many children the ancients would have missed. Instead of
drowning handicapped children after birth or abandoning them in a
wilderness, abortionists dismember them in the womb or kill them with a
lethal injection to the heart. They do this at a time when surgeons,
therapists, and teachers have made great progress in helping handicapped
children who are not killed before birth.

In the early 1900s, before development of prenatal testing, eugenicists
in many states promoted compulsory sterilization of people with mental
retardation or mental illness. They did this on the theory that if such people
had children, the children likely would inherit their mental problems.
Sterilization also swept up people who were not retarded--but were
desperately poor, had little education, and didn't speak standard English.

Carrie Buck, the young Virginia woman whose sterilization was approved by
the Supreme Court in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case, apparently was in this
category. Carrie had one daughter before her sterilization, but the daughter
died in early childhood (after making the honor roll in school). Though Carrie
worked hard at useful jobs--picking apples, for example, and caring for
elderly people--she never made much money. Nor, apparently, did her
husband. With no children to look after them in their old age, the couple
lived in dire poverty. Carrie Buck Detamore's grammar wasn't perfect, but
her logic was fine when she summed up the sterilization craze of her youth:
"They done me wrong. They done us all wrong."(7)

Eugenicists, though, could celebrate the fact that she hadn't been a
burden to taxpayers. Founders of the American Eugenics Society had said
eugenic measures meant that "our burden of taxes can be reduced by
decreasing the number of degenerates, delinquents, and defectives
supported in public institutions..."(8) That
appeal to economic self-interest was to be a major theme of eugenics. It is
still very much with us.

This 1930 eugenics membership list included
immensely wealthy and powerful Rockefellers,
other key members of the power elite, and
major geneticists.

By the 1950s and 1960s, leading eugenicists encouraged research on
prenatal testing and pressed for legal change to allow abortion of children
with serious handicaps. Why didn't they continue to rely on coerced
sterilization instead? A 1942 Supreme Court decision, Skinner v. Oklahoma,
while not overruling Buck v. Bell, had weakened legal defenses of
sterilization laws. Civil rights activists began protesting forced sterilization.
(Although many sterilization targets were poor whites such as Carrie Buck,
others were poor blacks.) In addition, there was much evidence to challenge
the assumption that mental retardation is usually hereditary. The
sterilization net probably had caught many people who wouldn't have had
"defective" children.(9)

The Ones It Missed

Yet it had missed many people who did have children with handicaps.
Such parents included the era's leading eugenicist, Frederick Osborn himself.
A letter in Osborn's papers indicates that his wife and nearly all of her
siblings had mental illness and that one sibling was institutionalized for 50
years or more. One of the Osborns' six children apparently had severe
mental illness.(10) Yet Frederick Osborn believed
that he and his wife, both descended from early American families, had excellent genes
apart from that one problem. In a 1962 letter to a granddaughter, Osborn said that "you are
the carrier of about as fine a set of genes as can be found. You may not
realize how good they are. Certainly in the top one or two percent of the
population as a whole. It would be a shame to mix them with poor stock..."(11)

Osborn's interest in eugenics predated his marriage and fatherhood.
The subject was popular in the upper class to which he belonged; and an
uncle, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was a leader of the eugenics movement. But
the younger Osborn's experience with mental illness in his wife and child
may explain the intensity of his interest in inherited disease. By the 1950s,
he knew that prenatal testing was becoming a reality. I have found in his
papers no discussion of this with reference to his own family. But he
probably reasoned that prenatal testing--combined with eugenic abortion--meant
that his grandchildren might eliminate any children with mental illness
and thus pass on only their good genes.

Osborn's correspondence suggests that he was an affectionate
husband and father; yet it's chilling to read some of his formal writing. In
1939 he wrote: "Fortunately, the death rates of persons suffering from
mental disease are far higher than those for persons of similar age in the
general population." And, forty years later: "An advance had been made in
public acceptance of the idea of controlling the birth of defectives..."(12)
Whether or not he made the connection consciously, the "defectives" he
wrote about included his own wife and child. He once declared, "People not
capable of sound thinking should be reduced in number as rapidly as
possible." Sheldon Reed, a eugenics colleague, remarked that this "sounds a
little stark. It gives me an impression that the guillotine is just around the
corner."(13)

As early as 1941, Osborn had said the public "should insist that doctors
and public health authorities get to work at reducing the number of
defectives." This was a recurring theme, and he used economic arguments to
back it up. By 1972, when Down syndrome children increasingly were
targeted by prenatal testing and abortion, Osborn complained: "Now with
modern medical care they can be carried through to an age of thirty to forty
years at an expense estimated at over $200,000 for each case of
mongolism" (as Down syndrome was then called). But he could claim
advance toward a longtime goal. "Reducing the frequency of inherited
defects and deficiencies," he wrote, "has become an important function of
medicine and public health. It is not done under the name of eugenics, but it
is no less effective for that reason."(14)

A socialist wing of eugenics has resisted the ideology's racial and class
bias. In the last century, that wing included prominent scientists such as H.
J. Muller.(15) The eugenic socialists, though, generally
shared the deeper prejudice based on disability. This is one reason why today's political
left accepts the combination of prenatal testing and eugenic abortion. The
disability-rights movement did not really get off the ground in the U.S. until
the 1970s. Had it started fifty years earlier, it could have done fierce battle
with eugenics, and it might have kept the political left true to the principle of
equal rights. Eugenics might not have become the powerful monster it is
today.

Margaret Sanger--a Planned Parenthood founder and onetime Socialist
Party member--was so enthusiastic about eugenics that she belonged to
both the American Eugenics Society and its English counterpart. Her
prejudice against people with disabilities was deep and unrelenting. In 1922
she complained that "the vicious circle of mental and physical defect,
delinquency and beggary is encouraged, by the unseeing and unthinking
sentimentality of our age, to populate asylum, hospital and prison." She
spoke of people "who never should have been born at all." Malformed
children, she said, were "biological and racial mistakes."(16)

Sanger did not improve with age. In 1952 she said people with
hereditary disease should not be allowed to marry unless they agreed to be
sterilized. Further: "No more children when parents, though showing no
affliction themselves, have given birth to offspring with mental and nervous
disease--morons, cleft palate, Mongolian idiots." By "Mongolian idiots," she
meant people with Down syndrome. British Dr. John Langdon Down, who
described the condition in the 1800s, mistakenly thought the almond-shaped
eyes of such people indicated a link with Mongolians. Idiocy was a term for
severe mental retardation, although in fact most people with Down
syndrome are not severely retarded.(17) Other
demeaning terms for disability have included "harelip" for cleft lip; "lobster claw syndrome"
for cleft hand or foot; and "anencephalic monster" for a newborn who is missing part of the
brain. Those terms have done much to isolate and dehumanize their targets.

At least Sanger did not call for aborting children with disabilities. But
the technology to find handicaps before birth was not available then, and
Sanger publicly opposed abortion in any case. In the same talk in which she
spoke of "Mongolian idiots," she dealt with population control and declared:
"Abortions break down the health of the mother without preventing renewed
pregnancy at an early date. Abortions are the very worst way to prevent
increase in the population. Let us make an end to all this suffering, waste,
enfeeblement and despair."(18)S

But Planned Parenthood would abandon this approach in the 1960s
under the leadership of another eugenicist, Dr. Alan Guttmacher. Meanwhile,
Sanger and others had encouraged terrible attitudes toward people with
disabilities. And I wonder: Did any of them, as they developed their own
disabilities in old age, regret things they had said when they were hale and
hearty?

The Great Manipulator

Frederick Osborn realized that overtly racist and political advocates of
eugenics had done it much harm in the early 1900s. He once told his
colleagues in the American Eugenics Society: "The public will accept negative
eugenics from the doctor in a way it would certainly not accept it from an
organized but non-scientific movement." Or, as he later said, "Eugenic goals
are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics."(19) His
establishment connections helped him bring this about.

As a trustee of a major foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New
York, Osborn wrote a 1940 memo on its funding of research in human
biology. That included what he called a "small but fairly rounded program in
medical genetics."(20) Around the same time, he wrote about a conference,
funded by eugenics society members, of the "Committee on the Registration
and Social Control of Subcultural and Defective Groups." The Rockefeller
Foundation, a major funder of eugenics, was represented at the
conference.(21)

Osborn had not served a day in the U.S. military; but as war
approached in late 1941, his friend President Roosevelt appointed him a
temporary army general and put him in charge of troop morale. Osborn
served throughout the Second World War, and his surveys of soldiers'
attitudes gave him helpful background for his eugenics work. He was a great
believer in using opinion surveys to shape both strategy and public-relations
messages.

After the war, and some diplomatic work for President Harry S.
Truman, Osborn plunged back into eugenics. He must have been happy to
see the formal launching of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG)
in 1948. All of the founding officers were eugenicists. The first president, H.
J. Muller, was an old-timer in eugenics, going back at least to 1921.(22)
He had written a 1939 statement, signed by other leading scientists, that is
sometimes labeled the "Geneticists' Manifesto." Essentially a declaration of
left-wing eugenics, it called for "ever more efficacious means of birth
control," including abortion "as a third line of defense" after sterilization and
contraception.(23)

Osborn signed up as a member of ASHG, and in 1958 he served as its
vice president. The genetics group was top-heavy with eugenicists in its
early years. Ten of its first twelve presidents were linked to eugenics. So
were many other early officers and several of its journal editors.

This 1985 book has valuable information on
H. J. Muller and other leading 20th-century
geneticists; but it does not connect the dots
between eugenics and the American Society
of Human Genetics.

In ASHG's 61 years of existence, over one-third of its presidents have
had formal eugenics links. More may have had them, but research on recent
decades is difficult. The American Eugenics Society last published a
membership list in 1956; so tracking recent members requires much
sleuthing in archives and elsewhere. After the society changed its name in
the early 1970s, many people assumed it no longer exists. But it is still with
us, and still publishes the journal Social Biology.(24)

From 1950 to 1961, the American Eugenics Society paid a great deal
of attention to medical genetics. Its publications, first Eugenical News and
later Eugenics Quarterly, published information on genetic disease. The
society sponsored several conferences related to the topic, including one to
encourage genetic advice in marriage counseling and another to promote
genetics teaching for medical students. It also persuaded the Population
Council to finance several fellowships for postgraduate work in genetics.(25)

It might be more accurate, though, to say that Frederick Osborn
decided to finance the fellowships. He was cofounder, first administrator, and
later president of the Population Council, which was funded largely by his
friend, John D. Rockefeller 3rd. The Council focused mainly on population
control in poor countries and among poor people in the U.S. Like other
Osborn enterprises, it was stacked with eugenicists. To obtain Council money
for genetics fellowships, Osborn took off his eugenics hat, put on his Council
hat, and told his Council colleagues what he wanted.(26) As old-time magicians
used to say of their own hat tricks, "Presto!"

This issue of the American Eugenics Society's flagship
journal contains the group's 1956 membership list.
Leading geneticists of the era were on the list.

Osborn also promoted "heredity counseling," in which geneticists
advised couples who feared that a family disease might be passed on to their
children. Sometimes a first child already showed evidence of the disease,
and the parents worried about the outlook for future children they hoped to
have. Geneticists reviewed information on family background and advised on
odds of transmission. If the genetic disease was especially devastating and
the chance of transmitting it seemed high, a couple might opt for
sterilization, contraception, or periodic abstinence--and then adopt children.
When Osborn and other officers of the American Eugenics Society issued
their report for 1953-57, they called heredity counseling "the opening wedge
in the public acceptance of eugenic principles." They realized, though, that it
was an uncertain process--a matter of educated guesses and calculations.

About 20 years earlier, their Eugenical News had reported on eugenic
abortion in Nazi Germany and in Denmark.(27) That practice,
too, had been based on guesses and calculations. Recently, though, there had been
breakthroughs in using amniocentesis for prenatal testing. Amniocentesis
dates back at least to the late 1800s, when doctors started to drain amniotic
fluid from the womb if a great excess of fluid endangered an unborn child
and/or the mother. In the 1950s doctors started using amniocentesis to
analyze and manage Rh disease. So the early uses of the technique were
truly therapeutic. But in 1955-56, researchers in several countries found that
fetal sex could be determined by checking fetal cells in amniotic fluid. This
led to abortion of male babies in cases of sex-linked genetic disease. (In
hemophilia, for example, when a woman is a carrier, each of her sons has a
50-percent chance of having the disease. Some parents were prepared to
abort every son rather than face hemophilia.) Then researchers found that
specific diseases could be diagnosed by studying fetal cells retrieved in
amniocentesis. Later there would be newer methods of prenatal diagnosis,
such as chorionic villus sampling (CVS) and ultrasound.(28)

Pushing the Deadly Combination

Frederick Osborn and his colleagues watched these developments
closely. A 1956 report in their Eugenics Quarterly noted that some sex-linked
diseases could be detected "at a state of pregnancy where interruption is still
possible." Yet "interruption"--a Danish euphemism for abortion--then was
illegal in the United States in nearly all cases. But not for long. The
Rockefeller Foundation was funding a project, run by the American Law
Institute, to write a model penal code for the states. British eugenicist and
legal scholar Glanville Williams was a consultant to the project. In a book
published while it was underway, Williams doubted there should be any
punishment for "a mother who, finding that she has given birth to a viable
monster or an idiot child, kills it." He supported abortion for fetal handicap.
"To allow the breeding of defectives is a horrible evil," Williams wrote,
adding that it was "far worse than any that may be found in abortion."(29)

Americans Frederick Osborn and Margaret Sanger were
on this English eugenics list, and British scholar Glanville
Williams was a fellow of England's Eugenics Society by
1959. A few years later, Williams became president of
England's Abortion Law Reform Association. He was one
of several eugenicists cited by Justice Harry Blackmun
of the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973).

Another consultant to the American Law Institute project was
Dr. Manfred Guttmacher, a psychiatrist. He
happened to be the identical twin of Dr. Alan Guttmacher, an obstetrician,
and Alan happened to be vice president of the American Eugenics Society.
(Later he would be president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of
America and would push that group into strong support of abortion.) Alan
Guttmacher sat in on at least two meetings related to the model penal code
and, in 1956, reported to his eugenics colleagues: "Even the most liberal
American statute [on abortion] makes no reference to any eugenic
consideration. The study group took cognizance of this omission and is
planning to frame a model statute to include eugenic considerations..." They
did just that. When the American Law Institute debated the issue in 1959, a
key leader remarked that doctors throughout the country were doing
abortions when there was substantial likelihood of defect, "confident that the
law cannot mean what it says."(30)

When the Institute approved the model penal code in 1962, it
proposed allowing abortion in several cases, including when a doctor finds
substantial risk "that the child would be born with grave physical or mental
defect." Eleven years later, in his 1973 majority opinion in Roe v. Wade,
Justice Harry Blackmun said 14 states had adopted "some form" of the
Institute's proposal, but didn't say how many had adopted the eugenics
provision. Blackmun also cited the Glanville Williams book, though not its
eugenics statements. But as attorney Rebecca Messall suggested in this
Review several years ago, it seems fair to suppose that Blackmun read the
book before citing it. She also documented other eugenics influences on
Roe.(31) That decision opened the floodgates
for prenatal testing and eugenic abortion.

The journal and annual meetings of the American Society of Human
Genetics had included information on prenatal testing for several years
before Roe, but frank discussion of eugenic abortion had been rare. Dr.
Jérôme Lejeune, the French geneticist who had discovered the chromosomal
basis of Down syndrome, raised the issue when he received the society's top
award in 1969. In a lecture that leading American geneticists still
remembered decades later, Lejeune proposed a special eugenics group--the
National Institute of Death--to get rid of embryos and newborns who didn't
meet certain standards. There was a catch, though: "To prevent any possible
error, concern, or prejudice, the advisors shall be chosen from among
knowledgeable persons not belonging to any philosophy, society, or race."

Turning from that ironic approach, Lejeune warned his American
colleagues: "For millennia, medicine has striven to fight for life and health
and against disease and death. Any reversal of the order of these terms of
reference would entirely change medicine itself." He added: "It happens that
nature does condemn. Our duty has always been not to inflict the sentence
but to try to commute the pain. In any foreseeable genetical trial I do not
know enough to judge, but I feel enough to advocate."(32)

Yet just a year later, American geneticist Arno Motulsky, receiving the
same award that Lejeune had, said that prenatal diagnosis "is giving an
exciting new dimension to genetic counseling." He looked forward to
development of prenatal testing for sickle cell anemia, believing that this,
"followed by selective abortion, would seem easier in the long run" than
avoiding mating of carriers or "complicated therapies of the disease." After
the American Eugenics Society changed its name, Dr. Motulsky's name
appeared on its (unpublished) 1974 membership list, and he served on the
group's board of directors in 1988-93.(33)

Marching into Eugenics

The March of Dimes played a huge role in developing and promoting
prenatal testing and counseling. Headed for years by Basil O'Connor, friend
and former law partner of President Franklin Roosevelt, the foundation had
focused on preventing the polio that had paralyzed Roosevelt and many
others. The success of polio vaccine in the early 1950s had left the wealthy
foundation casting about for another cause. In 1958 it announced a major
focus on birth defects. Soon Dr. Virginia Apgar became its Chief of
Congenital Malformations. She was a member of the American Society of
Human Genetics, and at some point she joined the American Eugenics
Society.(34)

Under Apgar and her successors, the March of Dimes vastly expanded
the number of genetics counseling centers in the U.S. It put large sums into
research to develop prenatal testing. It pressed for insurance reimbursement
for that testing and campaigned for government promotion of it. It funded
development of the National Society of Genetic Counselors. Audrey Heimler,
the first president of this society, appeared on the 1974 membership list of
the Society for the Study of Social Biology--that is, the old American
Eugenics Society doing business under its new name.(35)

The March of Dimes did, and does, support some positive approaches
to improve the health of babies both before and after birth. Yet it also has
conducted a relentless drive for prenatal testing. The foundation's long-published
professional journal, Birth Defects, carried many articles that
supported eugenic abortion. Writing there in 1971 about prenatal diagnosis
for couples who already had one child with disability, three professors bluntly
said: "The aim of such a program is the identification of subsequent affected
children and their selective abortion."(36) One
writer spoke about "abortion as a means of disease control." Others even suggested
aborting carriers of genetic disease.(37)

As awareness grew about the guilt and grief that eugenic abortion
caused to parents, Birth Defects started running articles about grief
counseling, support groups for couples, and even funeral services for
aborted children. One article noted that prostaglandin abortion "allows for
the parents to view and hold their fetus" and also allows "confirmation of
structural anomalies by autopsy." The writers added: "This confirmation may
alleviate parental guilt and allow for a more expedient resolution of the grief
reaction." But they coldly suggested that "controlled, psychologic studies" to
compare prostaglandin abortion with dilation and extraction (that is, abortion
by dismemberment) "are needed before the long-term psychologic effects
can be evaluated."(38)

Other writers offered a protocol for counseling parents through
abortion. Among their suggestions: "Validate their decision: What would
have been the burden on them? What would have been the effect on their
normal children? What would the affected child's life have been like?
Encourage or support the feeling that they had no choice but to terminate."
But what should they tell their other children about the abortion? The writers
suggested honesty and reassuring the others that "this can't happen to
them." They also advised: "Do not implicate the hospital as a place where
children go and never return."(39)

Like the article in the March of Dimes Birth
Defects journal just noted, this 1988
book advised telling siblings of a child who
is aborted for handicap that they will not
be disposed of because of sickness or disability.

Other Birth Defects contributors used the Orwellian words of "selective
termination" (killing one unborn twin who is handicapped while sparing one
who is not) and "fetal reduction" (killing one or more children when fertility
treatments produce twins, triplets, or higher multiples). Doctors do these
abortions by injecting potassium chloride to the fetal heart. At Jefferson
Medical College in Philadelphia, the writers reported, "As many as four
fetuses were terminated at one session." In the case of second-trimester
abortion for handicap, nothing was left to chance: "All pregnancies were
rescanned 30 minutes following the initial injection...and if cardiac activity
was identified, a repeat procedure was performed the same day." The
writers acknowledged, "Many couples question the level of 'consciousness'
that the remaining fetuses have and wonder if the remaining fetuses
somehow know that one of their potential sibs was terminated. These
couples wonder if children who remain will, as they grow, be a constant
reminder of the fetuses that were terminated."(40)

Perhaps March of Dimes leaders finally realized that Birth Defects was
a house of horrors. The last issue was published in 1996.

When under attack from right-to-lifers, the March of Dimes claimed
that it provided testing and counseling only, that it did not do abortions or
advocate for them. Asked about this claim in 1992, Dr. Jérôme Lejeune said
it would be the same as saying, "I'm selling guns to terrorists. I know they
are terrorists, but I am just selling guns. Nothing more than that."(41) Lejeune,
who died two years later, was one of the greatest defenders of the bedrock
medical rule, "First, do no harm." And one of very few in genetics.

18. Sanger (n. 17), 54. Sanger, though, was ambivalent about abortion;
see Robert G. Marshall and Charles A. Donovan, Blessed Are the
Barren (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 239-43. But in 1947 the
Planned Parenthood Federation of America was selling one pamphlet
called "Don't Have an Abortion" and another titled "Abortion: Crime
and Social Failure." See Eugenical News 32, no. 1 (March 1947), 14.

24. My figures here include people who at some point were members,
officers, or directors of the American Eugenics Society, under its old
name or current name. Sources include the Society's 1930 and 1956
membership lists (n. 16) and an untitled 1974 membership list of the
Society for the Study of Social Biology (hereafter called 1974 SSSB
list) that accompanies Richard H. Osborne, memo to G. Allen and
others, 3 Feb. 1975, folder on "Social Biol.: M.L.," American Eugenics
Society Records (n. 2); and Social Biology, 1972-2005. Names of
ASHG officers are from American Journal of Human Genetics, 1951-2007 and www.ashg.org.

26. On Osborn's role in the Population Council, see Meehan (n. 2). For
information on Council grants to the American Eugenics Society, see
Council annual reports and Population Council Archives, Rockefeller
Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.